It is uncommon to see a colloquialism published
in a scientific journal – a certain descriptive rigor is usually required of
authors. However, I stumbled across a rather intriguing one when I read a
recent paper that called into question the commonly held view that habitat
fragmentation had negative consequences for native ecology. Prof. Lenore
Fahrig of Carleton University in Canada reviewed empirical studies that showed
a significant response to habitat fragmentation (1). Her finding that 76% of
the studies showed a positive rather than a negative response was what led her
to challenge the assumption that habitat fragmentation is a major cause of the
erosion of biodiversity. I looked at the impact of habitat fragmentation a few
years ago, taking the approach of looking through the eyes of other, smaller
mammal species. It seemed to me that responses to habitat fragmentation
depended on the habitat selection and dispersal ability of individual species
(2). The effects of fragmentation will depend on the extent of specialisation
of the species, and what variety of landscape niches that are utilised. Thus
the reduction in population for a species that relies on a continuous natural
habitat begins to bite when the distance between fragments becomes daunting to
the point where it prevents dispersal, and so connectivity breaks down. Those
species which utilise edge habitats could at first benefit from fragmentation
as the extent of edge habitat increases, but increasing fragmentation again
leads to a breakdown in connectivity and population decline. However species
that utilise a number of niches could show an increase in population with
fragmentation, as the mosaic of niches becomes more mixed. There comes a point
though when habitat loss supersedes habitat fragmentation, breaking down any
connectivity and leading to population decline.

Ideas that should be dead but are not

I noted before that this increasing
anthropogenic fragmentation leads to an artefactual landscape. Fahrig
evidently seems to embrace this artefactualism, since she avers that her
results suggest that “generally speaking, land-sharing policies will
provide higher ecological value than land-sparing policies”. This is an
argument that condemns wild nature to a continuing, enforced co-existence
within our modified landscape rather than be given its own space. Even then,
“land sharing” is a misnomer when you consider how much of wild nature
has been purposively removed in the past as being inconvenient, and is still
being removed today in the ever downward spiral of trophic degrading (3).
Given her stance, I became more critical of her findings. Fahrig does
acknowledge some of the issues I outline above, but also acknowledges her
dependence on analysing studies that used species richness, an unrevealing,
bean-counting metric, as well as almost exclusively single-species responses
in the studies on birds. The limitations of species richness in relation to
landscape transformation have been addressed recently (4) as has the issue of
studies that used small plots and over short time periods, and which will not
fully represent the reality of landscapes that are fragmented, dynamic, and
continuously influenced by countless human activities on different scales in
time and space – shades of artefacts again (5). Fahrig is also weak in
incorporating aspects of dispersal, an overridingly important aspect of
fragmentation, but which have also been covered by a more recent paper (6).
Irrespective of these reservations, I do acknowledge Fahrig for introducing me
to the expression “zombie ideas”, these being “ideas that should be
dead but are not”. Thus it is her contention that negative consequences
arising from habitat fragmentation is a zombie idea, and that the “fact
that this zombie has persisted for more than 45 years is a testament to its
intuitive appeal”. Well, another word for intuition is instinct, and
instinct in wild animals is a pattern of behaviour in response to stimuli, and
thus is based on survival experience.

Fahrig references the phrase zombie ideas to a
blog by Prof. Jeremy Fox, an ecologist at the University of Calgary (7,8). Fox
in turn attributes the phrase to Prof. John Quiggin, an economist at the
University of Queensland, whose early use was in a demolition of neo-liberal
market ideas that resurfaced after the financial crash of 2008, but which the
crash had refuted (9,10). Quiggin, however, associated the phrase with Paul
Krugman (11) a columnist for the New York Times, who wrote that he originally
saw it in the context of myths about Canadian health care (12). He explained
that “Zombie ideas…are policy ideas that keep being killed by evidence, but
nonetheless shamble relentlessly forward, essentially because they suit a
political agenda”. Economics aside, but an interesting diversion, Fox made
a compelling case in his blog for the existence of zombie ideas in ecology,
and his prose stuck within the milieu – “Ecology (and probably every field)
has its own zombie ideas. In some cases they’ve survived decades of attacks
from the theoretical and experimental equivalents of chainsaws and shotguns,
only to return to feed on the brains of new generations of students” (8).
His focus in the blog was the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, and while
it is not entirely the same, it has some similarities for me with the unimodal,
hump-backed or bell-shaped relationship between species richness
and the level of disturbance (see Fig. 1a in (13)).

I have seen this hump-backed relationship of
Grime (14) pressed into a justification by proponents for High Nature Value (HNV)
farming, the concept of HNV characterised by low-intensity pastoral systems
with semi-natural vegetation, often in marginal farming areas (15,16). The
explanation is that the low to medium levels of disturbance associated in
extensive pastoral systems introduces a greater variety of niches and provides
greater colonisation opportunities for a wider range of species i.e. mobile,
opportunistic, stress tolerant or disturbance tolerant species. It’s the CSR
strategy for plant distribution based on levels of disturbance and stress –
Competitor – Stress tolerators – Ruderals (17). Beware though that the
diversity of niches in HNV doesn’t necessarily always have to be of a natural
origin arising from semi-natural vegetation, since it can also include stone
walls and hedges that can add to the density of features providing ecological
niches. At an intuitive, or instinctive level, I refute that a little bit of
farming is good for wild nature. What is ludicrous about this is the
implication that a lower value of species richness as it descends on the
left-hand side of the bell curve is a failure of undisturbed wild nature! Not
everyone accepts the Grime model, and various authors have fought it out in
the journals (e.g. 18,19). On first observation, it seemed mostly to be
characteristic of grassland systems, thus questioning whether the hump-back
relationship is an artefact of human modification, and not the result of a
natural disturbance, because it certainly didn’t apply to woodland (20). It
has become clearer though, that the unimodal relationship of species richness
is conditional upon what organism is being studied and in which environment
(13).

The hump curve is amongst some of the other
zombie ideas in ecology that Fox identifies and refutes (21,22). However,
before I move on to consider where the modern-day zombie ideas in ecology are
coming from, I want to give you one of Fox’s “zombie-fighting lessons”
which he says can be used to protect you against any other zombies which might
try to eat your brain – “Just because a famous ecologist, or lots of
ecologists, or a textbook, says something doesn’t make it true”. This would
certainly be the case for John Lawton, the “eminent British ecologist”,
Chair of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, and who led the review of the resilience
and adequacy of England’s wildlife sites (23). While
walking around Ennerdale during the 10th anniversary meeting in 2013, Steve
Carver and I challenged Lawton, a keynote speaker, to explain his support for
the fake farming there (24-26). He said that it was
all about the hump-backed curve. Steve and I were astonished at this response,
Steve subsequently following it up by email with Lawton in which he described
the evidence from the matched contrasts of the ungrazed and grazed Scar Close/Southerscales
and South House Moor/ Park Fell and Borrins. Steve thought that this evidence
told him that the relationship between grazing and biodiversity and associated
indices of fragmentation, dominance, biomass, together with successional
trajectories, isn't a simple one:“Conservation grazing by domestic/semi-domestic stock therefore needs
careful handling and is perhaps best kept as a tool for management of
traditional landscapes (hay and water meadows and the like), while allowing
only natural herbivory in rewilding projects, otherwise it is not really
rewilding is it? The graph is perhaps irrelevant as far as rewilding goes if
the objective of that rewilding is to allow natural processes to shape the
landscape and its ecology (through non-intervention management)”

Steve finished by asking Lawton what his
thoughts were, but twice Lawton refused to engage. Perhaps he suddenly
remembered his paper from 1999 on deciding whether there were general laws of
ecology, and in which he asserts that the unimodal species
richness-relationships may be considered a contingent rule in that it depends
on the organism and environment, as well as considerations of scale (27). So
why was Lawton so ready to apply the hump curve at Ennerdale? Perhaps it was,
as Paul Krugman would say, essentially because it suited a political agenda
(see above).

Other realities exist

Stewart Brand, inveterate founder of
organisations and an ecopragmatist, was quick to respond to Fahrig’s paper and
its message. He tweeted - “Habitat fragmentation is generally GOOD rather
than bad for wildlife--reversing a major premise of conservation” (28).
Brand labelled this a “major narrative violation” - and which led him
to assert that we should “protect and restore wildlands at *every* scale”.
Brand has previous form on challenging environmental doctrine in the sense
that he has written about the four environmental heresies that his
ecopragmatism tells him will become increasingly acceptable, such as
technological means to mitigate climate change, and urbanisation as a form of
population control (29). In this case, however, on habitat fragmentation, is
he missing the point or is he just applying a sticking plaster? My reaction to
the slavish dogma of the mainstream conservation industry is that “other
realities exist”, it being very apparent to me that there is a very
discernible biophysical reality when wild nature is in control, and which is
destroyed by the conservation industry’s managerialism – this would be the
degraded bits in between the habitat fragments. I have come across so much
that refutes managerialism since I began my advocacy of self-willed land that
I think I should now be able to attribute the slavish dogma to being a zombie
idea, and use the phrase as a riposte to what I see. It is so blindingly
obvious to anyone with freedom of thought, that it is a “major narrative
violation” to see it any other way.

In terms though of a more focussed riposte, I
deem nature development as exemplified by the ecological disaster that
is the Oostvaardersplassen as being a true zombie idea. Nature development is
a peculiarly Dutch concept about creating new nature (30). The concept may have had its
origins in the early 1970’s, when grazing was increasingly practised in nature
reserves (31). Like conservation grazing in Britain, the main emphasis was
botanical management with herbivores acting as lawn mowers. A new emphasis
evolved from the mid-70s to the early 1980’s when nature conservationists in
the Netherlands saw the opportunity to create what they alleged would be more
diverse woodlands, through experiments on forest grazing of stands of Scots
pine by Scottish Highland cattle in a complex of nature reserves at the
southern fringe of the Veluwe, a forest-rich ridge of hills. The thinking was
that the large herbivores would play a significant role as a tool in the
management of the area, but were increasingly being touted instead as part of
the ecosystem (32). It appears that Dutch ecologist Harm van de Veen was
instrumental in pushing this, based on his experiences in N. America (33, 34).
van de Veen gives one of the clearer explanations for the use of a nature
development approach when he wrote a critique in 1989 of the nascent
Oostvaardersplassen (35):“Do we want to maximize the reproduction success of a number of desired
species or dare we also look at nature in terms of natural rules that
determine the number of copies of which species by means of adaptation and
natural selection will be present. Or put differently: do we replace livestock
farming by godwit or geese cultivation or dare we, in areas that are suitable
for this, to provide the necessary policy space to the natural processes that
belong there with uncertain outcomes?”

He didn’t think that the Oostvaardersplassen,
famed after its reclamation from the sea for its greylag goose population (36)
then later for the cattle and horses introduced there, was much of a
demonstration of nature development. He concluded that since the Management
Committee had opted solely for water management, instead of setting goals
within which there was room for fundamental natural processes, then it was
hardly surprising that the Oostvaardersplassen Development Vision was actually
a "bird conservation vision".
The issue for him was that it is was not indicated which species would and
which species would not belong there, when he could foresee that a habitat
like the Oostvaardersplassen had many missing mammals, such as wild boar,
otter, badger and the other, smaller carnivorous mustelids (such as weasel,
polecat, pine marten, stone marten). He also believed that the lynx and wolf
should be there, but he noted that while the spontaneous migration in and
establishment of otter, pine and stone marten, and badger were likely, the
other missing mammals had been “reasonably ruled out for many decades”.
It is likely that he was particularly referring to the large carnivores, since
he had been rebuffed before about reinstatement of wolves in his experimental
areas, and it had always been his aim for self-regulation within the fauna
community, as well as a dynamic interaction between fauna and vegetation
(34,35). In this, van de Veen obviously realised the importance of building
trophic occupancy and structure at all levels.

Don’t trust your intuitions without doing the math

It is a sad misfortune that Harm van de Veen
died in 1991 at the age of 45 (33). He would likely have been a strong
advocate in keeping nature development away from its disastrous course of
trophic imbalance through solely dumping herbivores into fenced landscapes, a
policy that is of course wedded to the one-eyed fanaticism of Frans Vera as
the architect of the approach at the Oostvaardersplassen (37). The
Oostvaardersplassen thus became increasingly the emblematic area of Dutch
nature development (38) with Vera advocating that it be turned into a national
policy (39). In unravelling the cant at the Oostvaardersplassen, I
inadvertently followed another of Fox’s “zombie-fighting lessons”, this
one being “Don’t trust your intuitions without doing the math” (8). My
intuition told me, on seeing evidence of the overgrazed and degraded
landscape, and the many emaciated corpses of horses, deer and cattle, that
something was very wrong at the Oostvaardersplassen (40,41). I initially
calculated mortality from the difference between yearly counts of births of
the herbivores, set against a mostly unchanging total population density, and
found that the total deaths from starvation between 2005-2013 was around
8,000, or twice the total population (23, 40). I recalculated from a later
graph of winter animal deaths, finding a similar number of 8,000 between the
years 2011-2016 (42) with 1 in 3 animals having died in the winter of
2015-2016 (41, 43). It was enough for me to declare that the
Oostvaardersplassen is the closest we have in Europe to a demonstration of an
ecological meltdown from unrestrained herbivory, that conclusion being
reinforced by a rough calculation which showed that the total herbivore
numbers present at the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands is four times
greater than the herbivore density that is the threshold for woodland
regeneration (44). This is a level of herbivore pressure at its food-limited
carrying capacity, and which most evidently damages ecosystems (44). Two
recent pieces of evidence support this. Steve Carver, by way of Twitter (45)
took a pop at Guardian/Observer journalist Patrick Barkham for a facile
article in which Barkham regurgitated the usual untrue rubbish about the
Oostvaardersplassen (46):“Since the 1980s Vera has introduced wild cattle, horses and red deer to
4,000 hectares of rewilded marshland at Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve,
and proven that “natural” grazing creates a more dynamic landscape, a
constantly changing mosaic of open glades and wooded groves”

Steve noted that Barkham was patently wrong, as
there are no glades or wooded groves at the Oostvaardersplassen, and wondered
if Barkham had ever been there. Barkham tritely replied that Vera's theories
were certainly borne out at Knepp (more later) but Steve asked again whether
Barkham had ever been to the Oostvaardersplassen, and presented a time-tour
using Google Earth's historical imagery that showed the complete loss of
shrubs and trees from two sample locations between 2004-2015, except for where
there were small areas of fencing that excluded the herbivores (45). As Steve
said, it’s a sobering comparison. The other piece of evidence is that
supplemental feeding was carried out this month to stave off the intensity of
winter starvation that happens at the Oostvaardersplassen because of the
herbivores being at food-limited carrying capacity, as was also
carried out in 2010 (47,48). However, the repulsion
about the deaths at the Oostvaardersplassen has massively increased since
2010, and so another reason for the feeding this month was to prevent social
unrest.

Well, that hasn’t worked: a week after the
supposed supplemental feeding started, Dutch MEP Annie Schreijer-Pierik tabled
a Parliamentary question to the European Parliament on the starvation of large
grazing animals in the Natura 2000 area Oostvaardersplassen (49). She noted
that between December 2017 and February 2018, “at least 1,755 large grazing
animals died a cruel death from starvation in the Oostvaardersplassen”.
She identified that the “persistent starvation” was caused by an
excessively large population of animals being fenced in, and attributed the
habitat destruction to that. Her questions were whether the Commission was
aware of the adverse impact of the current policy, would it intervene, and
wasn’t it a contravention of the EU’s animal welfare and nature management
principles. It should be remembered that this ecological devastation is still
carrying on after there has been two international commissions reporting in
2006 and 2010 that were constituted specifically to deal with the issues that
Annie Schreijer-Pierik is raising yet again (24,40). Then two weeks after
that, Dutch animal welfare activist Norma Miedema posted a video of herself
and colleagues throwing hay over a fence at the Oostvaardersplassen, and with
the Heck cattle rushing to eat it (50). During a second video of feeding
elsewhere on the boundary fence, you can hear her say “killing fields”
on the sound track and the camera zooms in to a notice posted on the fence
that says “Oostvaardersplassen killing fields” (51). In both videos you
can see the devastating degradation of the landscape within the
Oostvaardersplassen from overgrazing. The responsibility for all this rests on
the monumental ego of Frans Vera. If he had
genuinely been interested in maintaining the water birds at the
Oostvaardersplassen, then all it needed was some seasonal conservation grazing
to manage for grassland, but instead we got his ecologically illiterate
experiment in nature development that has resulted in what must be well over
10,000 deaths. Given all the foregoing, then nature development as
demonstrated by the Oostvaardersplassen is definitely a zombie idea in
ecology, although the trophic imbalance and its consequences pretty much bars
it from being recognised as ecology.

A particularly wanton agenda

I’m going to stretch the concept a little for my
next zombie idea in ecology, but it is befitting in this case for the
organisation that perpetrates it. REFARMING (Rewilding) Europe continually
massages ecology to suit its purpose, a primary action being to assert that
the outcome of its actions creates the original natural landscape, and which
it visually portrays as being open and savannah-like. Well, it’s true that its
actions, the equivalence of maintaining a farming pressure, create and
maintain open landscapes, but it’s a leap of faith, or a particularly wanton
agenda, to believe there is any evidence that this is the original natural
landscape. You can see these fantasy future visualizations of the landscapes
of their project areas on the project pages of their website, but more easily
in one place in their annual review for 2016 (52). The key, as always, with
REFARMING Europe, is that their approach involves dumping lots of herbivores
into their project areas, often in places where there are no large carnivores.
REFARMING Europe doesn’t call it nature development, but it has a close
association with one of its founding partners that does since it is
“specialized in bottom-up nature development based on natural processes” (53).
That organisation is ARK Nature, yet another Dutch foundation, and it is
revealing that its name in the Netherlands is ARK Natuurontwikkeling, the
latter word being Dutch for nature development (54). I have frequently
documented my antipathy towards REFARMING Europe, not least that it has made a
good job of destroying the real meaning of rewilding, but it is where they
seek to push changes in policy and even legislation to their own advantage
that shows it to be the bullying organisation that it is.

Struggling hard to get its plastic aurochs
(back-bred, domestic cattle) accepted as wild animals, REFARMING Europe
alighted on the wheeze to push the use of another big herbivore in the bison,
which at least has a rightful claim to being a wild animal, except that
REFARMING Europe deliberately chooses to disregard paleoecological evidence
that indicates bison weren’t a native animal of the Netherlands (55). Tricky
that, when REFARMING Europe and ARK Natuurontwikkeling’s favoured first-try
dumping ground for their fantasies is the Netherlands. One of those dumping
grounds for ARK Natuurontwikkeling is a series of reserves in the Kempen-Broek
corridor that runs through farmland in the Limburg Province in the south of
the Netherlands, on its border with Belgium. ARK Natuurontwikkeling has five
grazing units spread along the corridor populated with 85 tauros (plastic
aurochs) one of which - Tungelroyse Beek (brook) – is 2.3km north of Stramproy
(see map on pg. 16 in (56)). This corridor is touted locally as a great place
for walking, except that three years ago, ARK Natuurontwikkeling had to shoot
three of the plastic aurochs in Tungelroyse Beek, as well as four other oxen
after being anesthetized, from amongst the herd of 21 animals (57). Its
explanation was that the despatched animals had become so nervous that their
"character no longer fits a possible encounter
between humans and cattle”. Well, you would have thought that it was an
aim of nature development for these plastic aurochs to have been as wild as
possible, but I guess not as wild as the real thing.

REFARMING Europe doesn’t restrict its lobbying
just to the Netherlands, making a big play for the Konik horses it introduced
in its project area in the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria to be legally
recognised as wild animals (58). It’s not just the horses either, as its plans
for the future of the project area show - “By 2024, a more supportive legal
framework is in place that better allows for further tangible rewilding
actions, like legally accepting the wild horse, the bison and the aurochs as
wild native species” (59). The situation of legally accepting free living
bison in Bulgaria is potentially feasible, but REFARMING Europe are dishonest
in naming aurochs, an extinct animal that their back-bred fakes from domestic
cattle will never be a replacement for, and van Vuure from the Netherlands
exploded the myth that Konik horses should ever be called wild (55,60). As
they did for bison (61) REFARMING Europe produced a glossy brochure on
rewilding horses in Europe (62) as part of their Wildlife Recovery Programme
that certainly has borne out its early intention of “focusing on large
herbivores to start with” (63). This recovery of wild horses is a bit
confusing as the Wild Horse Rewilding Action Plan notes REFARMING Europe’s
usual approach of back breeding from likely candidate breeds, as was done in
producing plastic aurochs, because there are “already a number of different
wild horse types” (64). However, to the contrary, the brochure says that the
“emphasis of this document is currently on rewilding, not on back breeding”
(62). This so-called rewilding is about choosing the “right breeds and
characteristics of existing horses for rewilding purposes” combined with this
aspiration - “Future scientific knowledge can and should be used to improve
the rewilding process and end product, such as adding or excluding certain
gene variants from the rewilded herds”. It seems that rewilding horses will be
about finding some space where REFARMING Europe can dump a diverse group of
horses, about 150, chosen allegedly for their wild characteristics, and let
them get on with it. If this doesn’t satisfy your need to understand what is
meant by rewilding horses, then contemplate this from the brochure -“Rewilding
is about respect for the authentic wildness of wild animals and thus respect
for the potential wildness of rewilded animals”

It is easy to have a poke at the absurdity of
REFARMING Europe, but it is more serious when it makes spurious claims that in
relation to supranational legislation are wrong. It is in that brochure on
rewilding horses that we get the claim that “Przewalski’s horse is a genuine
wild horse and does not need to be rewilded” and “they are not domesticated or
changed”. On the back of that, REFARMING Europe makes this astonishing
statement (62):“For the sake of completeness, it should be clear that introduction of the
(already) wild Przewalski’s horse is possible if a country includes the
species on its wildlife list where the EU Habitat Directive applies”

What it is saying is that there should be no bar
on introducing Przewalski’s horse to free living, as it represents a
still-living, wild species like the bison (see above). REFARMING Europe should
have been more cautious about asserting that, and taken more heed of their own
prescription that “Future scientific knowledge can and should be used to
improve the rewilding process” (see above). A year after that assertion, a
paper was published that showed that up to 25% of the genomes of Przewalski’s
horse consisted of gene variants inherited from domesticated horses (65). Then
last month, a study of the genetic analysis of ancient horse bones indicates
that Przewalski’s horses are the feral descendants of horses herded at Botai
in the Central Asian steppes, and not truly wild horses (66). I can find
nothing on REFARMING Europe’s website that acknowledges that this destroys
their assertion. REFARMING Europe will probably shrug this off like it did the
inconvenient bison paleoecological evidence, and for that reason I conclude
that its constant bending of the ecological reality of its favoured herbivores
is another zombie idea in ecology.

Allowed to scrub up BEFORE livestock were introduced

My last zombie idea is closer to home, but is
not entirely unconnected with what has gone before. Last November, Steve
Carver and I were puzzling over the disjointed spatial distribution of scrub
shown in an aerial video of Knepp in Sussex (67) the heavily subsidised meat
factory where it’s “‘rewilding’ is ‘process-led’ conservation” (68). We also
pondered another puff-piece video of Knepp, working out all the
inconsistencies within what was being said (69). We could not correlate
locations shown in either video with farm layout, and so we turned to
satellite imagery, where Steve did a time sequence on Knepp. It was not as
dramatic in reverse as the changes illustrated at the Oostvardersplassen (see
above) but the arrival of the new swimming pool and solar farm stuck out. I
would make no connection between the arrival of these and the amounts of
subsidy money that Knepp receives in Single Farm Payment (now Basic Payment)
and Higher Level Stewardship (70).

It seemed to us that scrub development was
concentrated in the southern block of the estate. To understand the spatial
anomaly in this development, I speculated about why some areas may be grazed
at Knepp more than others, the former areas being maintained as pasture by the
grazing through chewing off any woody regeneration, while the latter areas had
scrubbed up and been covered in ruderal weeds like thistles. I suspected it
correlated with areas that were previously permanent pasture to support the
dairy business, and thus will have had their grassland varieties improved over
time, whereas the scrubby areas will be those that were previously used in
arable cultivation and which thus did not have the improved grassland cover
when they were brought into the project, nor would they necessarily have
gained a grassland cover subsequently on their own. The cows obviously
preferred to graze where the grass was better in the permanent pasture of the
northern block, and where I walked around in 2007, especially during the
months of the growing season, whereas they would exert much less pressure on
any herbage that developed on the former arable areas. This allowed the scrub
species seeding in to get away in the ex-arable areas, as well as the
hedgerows around the arable fields. The ruderal weeds were more likely to
establish in ex-arable than they were in permanent pasture.

It was a bit of a stretch as an argument, but
what I found out subsequently was that the south block, the predominantly
former arable area, was allowed to scrub up BEFORE livestock were introduced,
so that the scrub there developed without an influence of the cattle. This was
noted in a Year 10 report for Knepp from 2011 in which the southern block is
described as an area that was farmed intensively for arable crops from the
1980s to 2004 and then pretty much all set-aside or left fallow by 2006 (see
the fig. on pg. 16 in (71)). There are a number of before and after photos of
the scrubby nature of the former arable fields dotted through that report. The
text explains what happened (pg.21 in (71)):“Scrub is an essential and valuable component of the changing vegetation away
from arable but its increase in some parts of the Estate is in conflict with
meeting the requirements of the Single Farm Payment…………But there are signs
that there are gradual improvements in vegetation structure and wildlife
diversity. To date, the greatest changes in vegetation structure are seen in
the southern block of land, which was taken out of arable production some
years before it was grazed. This has given time for scrub to develop prior to
any grazing pressure”

I found confirmation of this in another video
from Knepp in 2016 that was a BBC news report. Isabella Tree, the wife of
Charlie Burrell, was being interviewed surveying a scrubby scene – “It would
have been wheat, barley, maize ….flat as far as the eye can see, it would have
been monoculture, arable” (at 0.26m in (72)). Later, the BBC reporter is
walking in another scrubby area full of ruderals with Tony Whitbread, CEO of
Sussex Wildlife Trust and long associated with Knepp. In the narration over
the shot, the reporter, after explaining that the longhorn cattle introduced
by Charlie are farmed for meat, then notes that “critics say that this kind of rewilding is, in the end, little more than a glorified theme park”. He asks
Whitbread if he would “describe it as wild?”. Whitbread’s response – “In a
word, no” is one of the rare moments of honesty about Knepp to go with the
admission in the 10 year report that the scrub developed in the ex-arable area
before cattle were introduced.

Does this admission about the scrub
development matter?

It does if you
perpetuate myths that the cattle are the drivers of the landscape at Knepp –
“a fundamental and necessary force of natural disturbance” as promulgated by Frans Vera, the inspiration for Knepp and the perpetrator of my first zombie
idea (73). It smacks of being untrustworthy when the assertions at Knepp have
patently been untrue, such as that it is a "‘process-led’, non-goal-orientated
project where, as far as possible, nature takes the driving seat - an approach
that has come to be known as ‘rewilding’” (74). Another stinker in terms of
this alleged lack of goal orientation is – "The key to establishing and
maintaining this rich mosaic of habitats is to ensure that there are neither
too many, nor too few, grazing animals" (75). Well, this is fiddling with
grazing levels, the stockman having to check animal condition at the end of
each winter because they mostly live off body reserves during that period – he
had to use supplementary feed in 2010, as did the Oostvardersplassen (see
above) – and then judging how many cattle can be taken for meat (76). It’s
going to get trickier to fettle that land as the scrub develops more, because
the cattle won’t bother with areas where grass doesn’t grow in the shade
created by low growing scrub. They will, anyway, find it increasingly
difficult to push their way through that scrub, and their next opportunity to
get in there is when the canopy rises, as the scrub turns into trees. It’s
simple natural woodland dynamics. This is not what Charlie is looking for when
his patently goal orientated engineering of a mosaic of habitats within a wood
pasture landscape (77) just sounds like the dogma of mainstream conservation
gardening.

It could easily have been predicted that
exclusion of grazing pressure in the ex-arable areas at Knepp would have given
rise to scrub development– and apparently it was predicted, as shown in the 10
year review (see above) the scrub development described elsewhere as “pop-up
scrub”(69). This scrub, long with thistles and other ruderals, would have been
an encouragement to many invertebrate and avian species. The latter are thus
not there because of any cattle grazing. As I have written elsewhere, and
spoke about recently at a meeting on rewilding in Co Durham, It is the axiom
in Britain that a withdrawal of farming pressure is a pre-condition of moving
landscapes substantially along the wild land continuum through a recruitment
of the species lost by ecological simplification created by that agriculture
(78,79). The scrub development would thus explain the gushing reports of the
turtle doves, nightingales and blue emperor butterflies at Knepp (80) even
though the scrub and some of the ruderal weeds are in breach of the standards
of Cross Compliance under which Charlie received his Single Farm Payment, now
called Basic Payment Scheme, and which requires both to be controlled (see
above and (81)). How does Charlie get away with it?

The presence of these successesat Knepp owe everything to the scrub and nothing to the cattle

You would just have to read the report on the
nature conservation value of scrub in Britain to confirm this, since amongst
the many virtues of scrub, it says a mix of grassland, scrub and woodland may
be an advantage to many invertebrate species, providing a range of conditions
in close proximity, and several invertebrates associated with scrub may be
more usefully defined as woodland/grassland transition species (82). Many
invertebrates are phytophagous, feeding on woody plant genera – willows, which
appear to be one of the more abundant scrub species at Knepp, has at 752 the
most insect species associated with it (ch 3 in (82)). Scrub habitats appear
to be of increasing importance to the declining English population of
nightingales, more so than coppice, since they seem to prefer the safety
afforded by dense thickets (ch 3,4 in (82)). Scrub is also important for the
turtle dove, closed-canopy scrub is among one of its main nesting habitats,
though the birds obtain much of their food (seeds) from adjacent open
habitats. Neither of these birds, or even the butterfly, would be a real boost
to the trophic ecology of the farm. Thus turtle doves don’t eat fruiting
seeds, but instead mostly fumitory, knotgrass, chickweed and cereal grains, so
they don’t disperse shrub or tree seeds and, anyway, it’s a migratory bird. So
if scrub is the key to the species at Knepp, and this can develop without any
human intervention, why is Knepp sucking up so much public money on the back
of a few cows? Surely the money would be better usedbuying land out from
farming so that there would be no burden of exploitative income, and wild
nature can be given time and space conserve itself.

Knepp makes big play of cow pats, dung beetles
and little owls (69, 80). Little owl was introduced to the UK in the 19th
century, and it’s long been known that dung beetles are among the five most
abundant insects found in their diet (83). However, little owls also eat
worms, small mammals like mice and voles, and a few bird species. I wonder how
important the dung beetles are to the little owl at Knepp when, as would be
expected from the taller vegetation and litter layer in the less grazed areas,
there has been an explosion in harvest mouse, wood mouse, yellow-necked field
mouse, bank vole, field vole and common shrew (80, 84). Given that these small
mammals are the preferred food of our native owls - short and long eared,
tawny and barn owl - then it explains the presence of all the owls at Knepp
more convincingly than the cow pats. It also argues against the influence of
grazing as being important, since it’s the lack of grazing, like at Carrifran
and South House Moor, that led to taller vegetation and increases in small
mammals, and which are feasted on by short-eared owls at South House Moor
(79).

At the beginning of one of the videos, Isabella
Tree says that Knepp is not interested in managing for individual species (69)
but the only way the changes at Knepp are characterised is in bead counting
species, rather than communities of species, none of which has any real
ecological impact other than the owls and, even then those bead-counted
species were not predicted to migrate in, have not been related either to the
baseline ecological survey from 2006 (85) or to the habitat changes that could
have been predicted in the absence of grazing, or even to the impact of any
new food chains that have developed - a small owl eating a dung beetle has
less impact than a little eared owl eating a herbivorous field vole or a
common shrew eating a slug. Be aware that Isabella Tree has a book about Knepp
coming out this May (86) and which has already been plugged by two Guardian
journalists, who must have had an early sight of it, and one of whom – Patrick
Barkham (him again) - is an inveterate and uncritical promoter of Knepp,
recently regurgitating the wheeze of the public subsiding “pop-up Knepps”
for
25 years (87-89). I expect Isabella Tree’s book will be the usual procession
of inconsistencies, but I also expect there will be a lot of pleading for the
continued and substantial public funding of Knepp, but which has no certainty
now that the current subsidy system is being revised (90). Given the promotion
over substance; the inconsistencies; the cost to the public of this massively
subsidised meat factory; and the damage it has done in Britain to the concept
of rewilding (41) I judge Knepp to be a charade and thus a zombie idea in
ecology.